The Smile — aka Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet — have offered yet another preview of their forthcoming debut album A Light for Attracting Attention. Today, the trio share the new single “Thin Thing,” along with an accompanying stop-motion music video.
To put it in Radioheadish language: “Thin Thing” calls to mind the sprawling, entrancing art-rock of their Kid A or Hail to the Thief eras, building upon restless percussion in a barely-detectable time signature. As are most good Yorke songs, the lyrics to “Thin Thing” are equally anxious and amorphous: “First she’ll pull your fingers off/ And then she’ll pull your toes/ And then she’ll steal the photos from your phone,” he sings, as the rhythm section gradually builds into a jazzy climax.
Directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, the music video for “Thin Thing” is mesmerizing and dystopian, and took six months to complete. Featuring dismembered body parts, everyday objects, and random bursts of flames, it could almost pass as a short film from David Lynch’s early career.
The duo explain in a press release: “Hearing the song for the first time, we imagined a frenetic fluid that carries machines, pieces of human bodies and carnivorous plants. When presenting the idea to the band, Thom told us about a dream that made him write the song. We believe the video is the conjunction of these two things.” Watch the music video for “Thin Thing” below.
A Light for Attracting Attention comes out this Friday, May 13th, and it includes the previous singles “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” “The Smoke,” “Skrting on the Surface,” “Pana-vision,” and “Free in the Knowledge” — we crowned the latter our Song of the Week. Earlier this year, The Smile made one hell of a live debut by performing three concerts in just over 12 hours.